Motif is not yet available under a fully Open Source licence. The Open Group and ICS (the current maintainers of OpenMotif) are actively working on this and an announcement will be made very soon.

6) What version of Motif is CDE built against?

Motif, the X widget library that CDE is built against will need to be at least version 2.1.30. It has also been compiled against OpenMotif 2.3.3, the further semi-open development of The Open Groups's Motif (which is API and ABI compatible with 2.1.30).

7) Can I build CDE with Lesstif?

LessTif is an independent implementation of the OSF/Motif 2.1 library released under the GNU LGPL, meant to be compatible with Motif.

Building against Lesstif is untested and unsupported. It is also highly unlikely to work.

I'd like to try CDE, and I also *hate* Gnome 3. I've now gotten experience switching desktops installing Cinnamon, and soon maybe Mate. I tried building CDE on fedora 13 before I "upgraded", but it's beyond me. Has anyone succeeded in building for fedora 17?

Aside from looking just like your Grandaddy's workstation - is there anything worth noting ?

I'd say that Desktop KornShell is worth noting, since -- as far as I know -- it makes ksh the only Linux/UNIX shell with a full-fledged GUI toolkit (Motif). I know that people think that Motif is ugly, but by using the motif-devel package (and not lesstif-devel) to compile CDE, dtksh applications can become xft-enabled, so you'll at least get to use some nicer-looking fonts. I just compiled the latest CDE release (2.2.0d-beta) in F18, and finally got dtksh to work. I gave an example here: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpo...9&postcount=75

I know that there are more powerful scripting languages with GUI toolkits, but a lot of stuff in Linux still uses shell scripts, so it's nice to have the option of throwing in GUI elements in a shell script (beyond simple ones like from zenity).

Another nice thing about CDE: dtlogin, which is CDE's built-in display manager. I'd been wanting to replace the SLiM display manager, which is a bit flaky, with lxdm, but instead I went with dtlogin, which is very lightweight. Here's how it looks on my F19 system: